Reflections on the Revolution in France
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), by Edmund Burke, is one of the best-known intellectual attacks against the (then-infant) French Revolution. In the twentieth century, it much influenced conservative and classical liberal intellectuals, who re-cast Burke's Whig arguments as a critique of Communism and Socialist revolutionary programmes.
Background
See Also: Edmund Burke#French Revolution: 1688 versus 1789
Edmund Burke served in the British House of Commons, representing the Whig party, in close alliance with liberal politician Lord Rockingham. In Burke's political career, he vigorously defended Constitutional limitation of the Crown's authority, denounced the religious persecution of Catholics in his native Ireland, voiced the grievances of Britain's American colonies, supported the American Revolution, and vigorously pursued impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal, for corruption and abuse of power. For these actions, Burke was widely respected by liberals in Great Britain, the United States, and the European continent.
In 1789, soon after the fall of the Bastille, the French aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont asked his impressions of the Revolution; Burke replied with two letters. The longer, second letter became Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790.
Arguments
In the Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously, because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society. Further, he focused on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing 'What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor."[1] Following St. Augustine and Cicero, he believed in "human heart"-based government. Nevertheless, he was contemptuous and afraid of the Enlightenment, led by intellectuals such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Turgot, who disbelieved in Divine Moral Order and Original Sin, saying that society should be handled like a living organism, that people and society are limitlessly complicated, thus, leading him to conflict with Thomas Hobbes's assertion that politics might be reducible to a deductive system akin to mathematics.
As a Protestant and Whig, he expressly repudiated the belief in divinely-appointed monarchic authority and the idea that a people have no right to depose an oppressive government; however, he advocated central roles for private property, tradition, and 'prejudice' (adherence to values regardless of their rational basis) to give citizens a stake in their nation's social order. He argued for gradual, constitutional reform, not revolution (in every case except the most qualified case), emphasizing that a political doctrine founded upon abstractions such as liberty and the rights of man could be easily abused to justify tyranny. He saw inherited rights, restated in England from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right, as firm and concrete providing continuity (like tradition, 'prejudice,' inheritable private property,) by contrast enforcement of 'speculative' abstract rights might waver and be subject to change based on currents of politics. Instead, he called for the constitutional enactment of specific, concrete rights and liberties as protection against governmental oppression.
In the phrase, "[prejudice] renders a man's virtue his habit," he defends people's cherished, but untaught, irrational prejudices (the greater it behooved them, the more they cherished it). Because a person's moral estimation is limited, people are better off drawing from the "general bank and capital of nations and of ages" than from their own intellects.[2]
He predicted that the Revolution's concomitant disorder would make the army "mutinous and full of faction," and then a "popular general," commanding the soldiery's allegiance, would become "master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic."[3] Though he may have been thinking of Lafayette, Napoleon fulfilled this prophecy on the 18th Brumaire, two years after Burke's death.
Most of the House of Commons disagreed with Burke and his popularity declined. As the French Revolution broke into factions, the Whig Party broke in two: the New Whig party and the Old Whig party. As founder of the Old Whigs, Burke always took the opportunity to debate the New Whigs about French Jacobinism.
After trying to loosen the Protestant minority's control of Irish government, he was voted out of the House of Commons with a great pension. He later adopted French and Irish children, believing himself correct in rescuing them from government oppression. Before dying, he ordered his family to bury him secretly, believing his cadaver would be a political target for desecration should the Jacobins prevail in England.
Intellectual influence
Reflections on the Revolution in France was read widely on publication, though not every Briton approved of Burke's kind treatment of their historic enemy or its royal family. His English enemies speculated he either had become mentally unbalanced or was a secret Catholic, outraged by the democratic French government's anti-clerical policies and expropriation of Church land. The publication of this work drew a swift response, first with A Vindication of the Rights of Men by Mary Wollstonecraft, and then with Rights of Man by Thomas Paine. Nonetheless, Burke's work became popular with reactionaries such as King George III and the Savoyard philosopher Joseph de Maistre.
Historically, Reflections on the Revolution in France became the founding philosophic opus of Conservatism when some predictions occurred: the Reign of Terror succeeded the execution of King Louis XVI and his wife, to purge anti-revolutionary enemies of the people. That, in turn, led to the political reaction of Gen. Napoleon Bonaparte's military dictatorship. Burke had predicted the rise of a military dictatorship and that the revolutionary government instead of protecting the rights of the people would be corrupt and violent.
In the nineteenth century, positivist French historian Hippolyte Taine repeated the Englishman's arguments in Origins of Contemporary France (1876–1885): that centralisation of power is the essential fault of the Revolutionary French government system; that it does not promote democratic control; and that the Revolution transferred power from the divinely-chosen aristocracy to an "enlightened" heartless elite more incompetent and tyrannical than the aristocrats.
In the twentieth century, Western conservatives applied Burke's anti-revolutionary Reflections to popular socialist revolutions, thus establishing Burke's iconic political value to conservatives and classical liberals. For example, an important liberal, Friedrich Hayek, acknowledged an intellectual debt to Burke.
References
External links
- http://www.constitution.org/eb/rev_fran.htm An online version of the text
- http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2004/04/hitchens.htm Good explanation by Christopher Hitchens of the work and the reaction to it and importance.